"Everything that the big city threw away,
everything it lost, everything it despised, everything it crushed
underfoot, he catalogues and collects......"
Charles Baudelaire (on the Parisian rag pickers)

The Chicago writer Nelson Algren has come down
to us in a few books: some short stories, a great many reviews
which he wrote for pay, and the novels, later filmed: "Man
With A Golden Arm," and "Walk on the Wild Side."
Born in 1909, Algren comes of age in the first great period of
photographic reproduction. Spurred by the demand for photos of
the First World War, and aided by the simultaneous spread of film,
the news photo comes into its own in the period just preceding
the World War.

Algren grew up in a world inundated with photographs. Suddenly,
the world was looking at itself in a completely new way.
Algren headed the Federal Writers Project in Illinois. He worked
in that fertile period when the Farm Security Administration documented
the Depression and advanced American photography.

Algren begins to write seriously in the 30's and saw the photos
of Margaret Bourke White, Walker Evans, Bernice Abbot, Steiglitz
and Weston.Algren meets Stephen Deutch in the early 60's and the
two became friends. Deutch's photo essay on Chicago was published
as part of Algren's "Chicago: City on the Make." A lyrical
look at the town that Algren made his trade.Deutch will remain
an Algren friend until the end. Algren's long friendship with
Art Shay produced Shay's, "Nelson Algren's Chicago,"
which is the best document we have of his world.

Algren never forgot the Haymarket episode,
and makes it part of his "Chicago: City on the Make."
His emphasis on remembrance, on history, and the local amnesia
informed his eye as well as his hand. For nowhere has the past
been so carefully forgotten as in Chicago, a city founded on a
crime.

Shay's book reveals Algren playing the lead
in his own film. A black and white docu-drama about urban decay,the
unofficial side of Chicago life and the drab, beaten reality at
the bottom. Shay's Algren is the bespectacled observer of life
at its hardest. Algren had little distance from his material;
he continued to live in a three flat on Evergreen for much of
his post war life. He sold out what little he had in the mid 70's
and headed for the East Coast where he died, bitter and obscure,
cheated of his legacy by a world that had turned on those who
had sought to expose the agony at the heart of American life.

Part of his appeal for intellectuals like De Beauvoir and Sartre
was his view of the American Class struggle. Chicago, with its
Class war past; its ghettos and political machines, and its arrogant
merchants had long been infamous. As he was to learn; to be successful
in Chicago means getting to get out. It was an option he didn't
consider until it was too late.

Chicago has long attracted visitors from all over the world because
of the look of the place. Its architecture, springing as it does
from Louis Sullivan, Wright, Burnham, and Holabird and Root, is
world renowned and well documented. Algren's cityscapes blend
Beaudelaire and Lloyd Wright; Film Noir and Capitalist realism.
Its the world revealed in the Shay and Deutch photo-essays. The
shakedown, the lineup, the cell, the corridor lit from above with
its caked, split and frayed floor, the lightless window and the
shattered door are the images of which Algren's prose is composed.
If it was to be Brecht's task to write of the migrations to the
great cities, cities which he saw as jungles, it was Algren's
to record what happened within them.

The systems of ruthless oppression posing as Justice, the ward
boss and ward heeler with their equivalents in the Southern sheriff,
whose word was Law and whose Law was racism; the ghetto bred political
overlords promising help while ruthlessly exploiting were part
of his history.

Chicago today is an exciting American city. A manicured Lake Front
and Gold Coast, and a well massaged Downtown give way, as one
moves West, to the monotony of bungalows interspersed with car
wash and gas station. The sheer drabness of the West Side is still
testament to red-lining, and real estate manipulation.Austin,
once prosperous, is now as blighted as any local ghetto.

Photography has been called a "cool" medium, and that
chill reflects a reality. Photographs can document as well as
aestheticise.
The dawn of photography mirrors the arrival of the muck rakers
like Algren. One of them, Lewis Hine, happened to be a great photographer.
Hine's pictures of immigrant life in New York remain the great
photographic testament to human courage and the sordid spaces
where it withered. Mothers and children crowded into closets;
sweat shops and bordellos; bars and restaurants, all served Hine's
lens; but the documentation of human misery summoned his genius.
Like Algren his vision worked from the bottom up.
The photograph cannot be eluded in the same way that a book can
be set aside.

Algren's writing can be both lyrical and documentary:
"..the wind goes banging ashcans down every alley with an
old blue hammer, and here comes Springtime as a small girl, astride
a tricycle with flags in every spoke, wheels whirlabelling the
confetti colored pennon of her laughter down the long bright block
behind her."Algren notes that the lower you go on the urban
food change, the sharper the pictures and the more blurred the
story. But there is no second guessing Shay's shots of Milwaukee
Ave. at night, or Deutch's portraits of leather jacketed urban
kids hanging out.

Was it work that brought them here, asks Algren? And if it did
maybe some of them "went to work too soon." Too young
to ever recover from that awful, once visionary formula: "Eight
hours for work, eight hours for sleep, eight hours for play."
Is that really why we have come all this way, asks Algren? And
if that's the sad payoff, then count me out. As a child Algren
could open his newspaper to pictures of his baseball heroes, like
Shoeless Joe Jackson, one of the games great players victim to
Comisky's greed and the Black Sox scandal of 1919.

The photograph made Chicago visible in a new way. Big Bill Thompson,
Capone, Dion O'Banion, Yellow Kid Weill, Dillenger and Baby Faced
Nelson have not been completely lost to memory, but their faces
have disappeared. Much as today's flavor of the month is destined
for the ash can of history after having been imprinted solidly
in every American mind for just over five minutes.

Photos are forever fading and being replaced with new images,
just as people and causes fade, only to be resurrected, still
distorted, or finally understood.
How many Americans today could identify Charles Lindbergh, who
conquered the Atlantic in 1927? And yet his was the most famous
face of the first part of the 20th Century. Others, through TV
and film, survive today more recognisable than when they first
appeared.

The cheap availability of video footage has meant that the free
images of Hitler, which anyone can use, have kept him a fixture
of documentary and history based television. His counterparts:
Tojo, Mussolini, and Franco remain obscure. Unlike the Nazi's,
they commissioned no film teams to document their horror. It was
Leni Riefenstahl's "Triumph of the Will" that made Hitler
an iconic figure.

But in our own time, with the constant proliferation of images
that TV and video and now the DVD have brought about, who can
remember a single face? Who recall the snapshots of ones childhood?
Is it getting harder to remember, or do these images remain with
us to the very end? How do we counter the relentless advertised
reality? Or has the photograph and its animated ancestors created
a culture of amnesia: so crammed with imagery that no single unconfused
thought is possible, and no likeness retained? These are some
of the questions Algren's work still poses: questions more potent
now than when he first asked them.

Warren Leming is a Chicago writer and playwright
who is vice chairman of the Nelson Algren Committee.